Exley (24 page)

“Hello,” M.'s mother whispers, and with that whisper the letters disappear from my brain, if not from my possession.

“I was just thinking about you,” I say.

“Really?” she says.

“Yes,” I say. “Really.” Fortunately for me, we are on the phone, and she can't see my smile, can't see how pleased with myself I am. I've never been at all proficient at “playful banter” until now.

I hear M.'s mother sip on something, hear the clink of ice cubes against glass. Normally, I am against the consumption of alcohol—against and, indeed,
opposed to it
—but I am prepared to have an open mind where drinking and M.'s mother are concerned. I am prepared to love it if she loves it, or if it makes her love me. I hear her sip again, then sigh. “Everything OK?” I ask.

“M. and I went out for M.'s birthday dinner,” she says.

“Where?”

“The Crystal,” she says.

I think immediately of seeing M. outside the Crystal this morning, seeing him kick the man on the sidewalk, etc. And then I think of all the things—true and untrue—that I've learned about M. by reading his journal. And then I think of his fraudulent letters, and I think I should tell his mother about them, all of them. But I cannot, because in telling her about the former, I will have to admit I did nothing to stop him. And about the latter, I will have to admit that I broke into their house. Suddenly I feel tired, bloated, and disgusted with deceit, and when I say, “Oh,” M.'s mother must hear something of that in my voice, because she says, “I know. But it's M.'s favorite place. We always go there for his birthday.” Her voice suddenly sounds distracted and far away.

“Do you want to tell me about it?” I ask. She does: she tells me about
how she and M. were having a good time until he “freaked out,” and then she describes the freak-out. “I'm so glad you'll be seeing him tomorrow,” she says. “I really do think you're helping him.”

“I think I'm helping him, too,” I say. But then I picture M. standing in the college classroom by himself, and I wonder if I really am helping him. I wonder if a better mental health professional would have ignored the security guard and walked into the classroom and demanded M. admit that whoever K. was, she wasn't his student, because he wasn't teaching a class. I wonder if a better mental health professional would be sneaking around his patient's house and wooing his patient's mother. I wonder if a better mental health professional would be telling his patient's mother about what he'd found out about her son. I wonder if a better mental health professional would be talking to his patient's mother
at all
. But the thought of not speaking to M.'s mother
at all
is too much: my brain—my brain and, indeed,
my mind
—can't handle the thought, and I blurt out, “Did your husband really teach at Jefferson County Community College?”

“Why?”

“M. says he did,” I say. “It might be easier to know what M. is making up if I know what he isn't.”

M.'s mother sighs again. “M. might really think his dad was an English professor,” she says. “For that matter, his dad might have thought he was an English professor, too, after telling me for so long that he was one.”

“But he wasn't,” I say.

“No,” M.'s mother says. “Instead of teaching a class every Tuesday, he was . . .” And here she pauses for a moment. Clearly M.'s mother won't, or can't, finish her thought. Fortunately, one of the main tasks of the mental health professional is to finish his patients' thoughts for them, even when, as is the case with M.'s mother, they are not my patients.

“Out conducting an extramarital affair,” I say at the same time that M.'s mother says, “Out drinking beer with his buddies.”

“Did M. tell you that?” M.'s mother asks. “That his dad was having an affair?”

“In so many words,” I say.

“Oh Jesus,” M.'s mother says, her voice quivering. After that, she is quiet for a long time, except for the regular clinking and sipping of her
alcoholic drink. I wonder what she's thinking. I wonder if she's thinking what I'm thinking: that it's a terrible thing for a son to know the truth about his father; that it's a terrible thing for a wife to have to know the truth about her husband; that it's a lucky thing for a mother and a son to have another man around to be a father and husband figure, if that's what they want him to be.

“I'm so tired,” M.'s mother finally says. That's how I know that this part of the conversation is over. But I don't yet know what the next part of the conversation is or how to begin it. All I know is that I don't want the conversation to end. All I know is that I want to keep talking to her tonight, and tomorrow night, too. Except tomorrow night M.'s mother is giving her own talk.

“Would you like me to come to your lecture tomorrow night?” I ask.

“That's sweet of you,” M.'s mother says. “But I don't think so.”

“Oh,” I say. Perhaps she can hear my woundedness, because she rushes to reassure me.

“It's just that it's been so
easy
to talk to you on the phone,” she says. “We're going to see each other in two nights anyway, right? I'd just love to be able to talk on the phone until then. Is that OK?”

I tell her it is. “Will you call me tomorrow night after your talk?” I ask, and she says she will. She does sound tired, and so I suggest we hang up and talk again tomorrow night.

“Hey, you're not mad at me, are you?” she says, and I tell her I'm not. Because I do know what she means. I want to tell her that. I want to tell her that I was lonely before I started talking to her on the phone, and now I don't feel lonely anymore. When we stop talking on the phone and start “seeing” each other (in the ocular sense), will something go wrong and will I start feeling lonely again? As she says, we will see each other soon enough; until then, we should talk on the phone. M.'s mother is right: it's so easy to talk on the phone.

“Good luck tomorrow night,” I say. “I'll be thinking of you.”

“Thank you,” she says. Her voice sounds happier, but also frantic. I've heard this shift in tone before: my patients sound this way when they're depressed but frantically trying to convince me and themselves that they're not depressed. “And I really am looking forward to your talk!”
She asks what she should wear to the gala, and I tell her that I'm sure she'll look beautiful in whatever she wears. “That's so sweet,” she says, which I take to mean I've said the right thing. “But what do the other women wear?” she asks. “Other women?” I say. Because the NCMHP is, frankly, mostly male—mostly male and, indeed,
male dominated
—and most of the males either don't have spouses or partners, or choose not to be seen with them in public. There
are
two female mental health professionals in the NCMHP; they are former nuns and tend to wear long black jumpers made out of an indeterminate fabric. I tell all this to M.'s mother. “Oh,” she says, which I take to mean I've said the wrong thing. I hasten to get off the phone before I say anything else.

After we hang up, I start reading
A Fan's Notes
from where I left off, in the middle of chapter 4, “Onhava Regained and Lost Again.” Because while I have solved some of the mysteries surrounding M. and his family, some mysteries remain. Perhaps the book doesn't have all the answers. But that does not mean it doesn't have some of them.

 

 

T
he wee hours of the morning, and I am furious and am furiously smoking (cigarettes) for the first time in years and years. If I die of lung cancer, I shall blame M. Why am I smoking? Why shall I blame M.? Why am I furious? Because on
page 142
, I find myself in Exley's book. Not myself, rather, but my name; not my real name, rather, but the name M. has given me. The name M. has given me is not the name of a real character in the book or a real person in this Exley's life; rather, it is the nickname he gives his—I can barely bear to write these words, Notes!—
male pudendum
. Exley claims this is the French word for the male pudendum. In this he is incorrect, of course: the proper French term for the male pudendum is
le pénis
. But still.
But still
. As Exley himself would say, for Christ's sake! This is an unacceptable way for a patient to treat his mental health professional, no matter how ill the patient. I pledge to myself to teach M. this lesson immediately before taking him to the public memorial service on the Public Square, where I will teach him another lesson. But between now and then, I will read the rest of
A Fan's Notes
. Strangely, I am looking forward to it. Strangely, now that I know the part of the book—the part of the book and, indeed, the
part of the male anatomy
—that M. has used to name me, the more enraged I am, and the more enraged I am—the more
pissed off
I get—the more the book speaks to me, the more it seems to be just as much about me as it is about Exley.

 

 

I
t was another Sunday. This was when I was probably seven years old, when I was still in the grade someone my age was supposed to be in, still only reading books someone my age was supposed to read. Mother was sitting at the kitchen counter, reading stuff for work. I was sitting next to her, reading the Sunday comics. My dad came in from the living room, jingling his keys. “I think I'll take Miller to the zoo today,” he said.

“The zoo?” I said. I mean, I knew what a zoo was. I knew there was one right in town. I'd been to it before, with my preschool class. I'd been to it with Mother, too. It was fun when I went with my class. When I went with Mother, everything was wrong. The polar bear looked sick. The monkeys had some sort of skin problem, or at least they kept eating their skin and then gagging on it. There seemed to be more concrete in the pens than when I'd been with my class. The zebras stank so bad that Mother and I had to hold our noses until we got to the reptile house, where all the lizards were sleeping except for the one that was dead. When we got back in the car, Mother seemed to be trying hard not to say something. “Well, that was fun,” she'd finally said.

“Yes,” my dad said. “The zoo.”

“Really?” I said. We'd come back from eating breakfast at the Crystal not fifteen minutes earlier, and during breakfast my dad hadn't asked me if I'd wanted to go to the zoo or anything like that.

“Really?” Mother said to my dad.

“Really,” my dad said. He looked her right in the eyes when he said this. She looked back at him, then back down at her work.

“That sounds like a nice idea,” Mother said. “I can't wait to hear all about it when you get home.”

“Good,” my dad said. His lips were set close together. He nodded at me in a determined way. “Let's go, bud,” he said.

We went, but not to the zoo. I knew that when we got to Factory Street and my dad pulled to the curb and parked.

“This isn't the zoo,” I said.

“Don't tell your mom,” my dad said.

My dad got out of the car, and I did, too. We stood there for a while. There were two bars right next to each other. I didn't know they were bars then but I know that now. One was called C.'s; the other, M.'s. My dad seemed to be trying to figure out which one we wanted to go into. We stood there for a long time. We might still be standing there if an ambulance hadn't pulled up in front of our car. The ambulance guys jumped out of the ambulance with their gear and sprinted into C.'s.

“Why don't we go into M.'s,” my dad said. I didn't say anything. I didn't know what M.'s was or why we would want to go into it at all. The place had windows, but they were black, or at least darker than normal windows, and I couldn't see inside. My dad took my hand, and we walked to the door. He opened it with one hand and gently pushed me inside with the other.

The place wasn't as dark as the windows, but it was noisy. There was music playing from somewhere. The music was loud and angry. It sounded like it sounded when someone stuck something they weren't supposed to into one of the machines in metal shop. My dad and I just stood there until the song, or whatever it was, ended. Finally it did. We walked to the bar. There were stools, unlike at the Crystal. My dad picked me up and put me on one of the stools and then sat on the next one to the left. There were a couple of empty stools to my dad's left. There were a couple of empty stools to my right. Then there were two guys. They were wearing orange ski hats and had patchy beards. They looked older than my dad: there was white in their beards, and the hats had black stains on them. The guys didn't seem to notice us at first. They were drinking bottles of Genny Light—I remember seeing the label—and looking at one of the televisions. There were two televisions, one above each corner
of the bar. The two guys were watching the TV to the right. I couldn't see what was on it, although I heard voices coming from it. And then another song started playing, with a clang, and someone in the bar shouted. The voice came from behind me. I turned and saw two guys throwing darts at a board. And behind them I saw what looked like a small old lady sitting by herself at a table, a juice glass on the table in front of her.

“You guys got IDs?” a woman's voice said. I turned back around and saw a woman standing on the other side of the bar. She was around my dad's age. Her hair came down to her shoulders, where it flipped out, making the letter
J
on one side, and the backward letter
J
on the other. She was wearing a white shirt with no sleeves even though it was almost Thanksgiving. Outside, it felt like it; inside, it was warm. The woman had her hands on the bar and was looking at us seriously. I glanced over at my dad. He had a nervous expression on his face. My dad's coat was off his shoulders and halfway down his arms. It was like he was trying to take it off and it got stuck on his elbows.